Hello all,

I am rebuilding software for years now and found myself always involved in the dependency issues. There are a lot of circulair dependencies too in most basic packages. I have a text file where I have the basic package listed, followed by dependencies.
This worked fine sofar, but dependencies are shifting so maintaining this file becomes a burden because I want to produce things, not chase after a moving target.

So, I have search the Internet but can't find Linux software to read my source files and create a tree of dependencies.

So, any suggestion to get rid of this hassel are more than welcome.
Regards, Frans.

I have always used a modified version of the technique described here

Automatic Prerequisites

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Thanks, however that's not what I am looking for. I found the program debtree which visualizes dependencies. Alas, it works only on Debian repositories and not on the sources I use.

Of course, given your pointer, I could build a script to generate eventually some (text) output. But since my time is limited I hope someone can pint me towards some software which allows dependency visualization.

The current text file is just cumbersome. A small extract around CAIRO:

### name - dependencies
cairo - png jpeg directfb poppler libspectre librsvg libxml2 glew
ghostscript - cairo jasper png jpeg
openjpeg - png lcms2 tiff
poppler - png jpeg libxml2 openjpeg qt4 tiff cairo libcurl freetype gdk
poppler-data
libspectre - cairo libgs
libcroco - libxml2
librsvg - png libxml2 libcroco gdk-pixbuf
cairo
poppler
libspectre
cairo

which indicates that I have to compile cairo three times to get the final result.

Hope for some help.
Frans.

so are you running debain ????

if so then rpm-build will not help

No, I do not use Debian. I use a minimalistic OpenSuse 11.x as base and build all kind of packages from scratch.

Update: I found the combination doxygen and graphviz to produce some usefull pictures.
However, I then realized that I still have no overview of dependencies outside the package processed.
So visualization of dependencies between libraries themself and/or other software is still the question.

Regards,
Frans.

Oh well, I keep on talking to myself

No, the combination doxygen and graphviz is great for projects itself. It does not give insight of external dependencies, unless I invest a lot of time. In that case I can better inspect the Makefile and/or configure files to get some answers.

It is a suggestion if I look at the LFS project? It's been a long time I've been there but I seem to remember that some advanced projects did go beyound a basic system.

Still open for suggestions!
Regards, Frans.